In 1974, Debbie and Vicky Roe were living their dream. The sister act—Debbie was 22 and Vicky, 17 – had just returned from Nashville where they’d cut a country-and-western album called Soft, Sweet and Country.
“We’d been singing together professionally for about four or five years,” Vicky told me. “We used to do talent contests around town, and we used to sing at the nightclubs before we could legally get in.”
Story from Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders
A local songwriter and family friend sent a demo tape to Cherish Records. The record label liked the demo, and Debbie and Vicky flew to Nashville to record an album. Their back-up musicians included some of the best talent in country music at the time—Bobbe Seymour, Steve Gibson, Buddy Emmons, and Charlie McCoy.
Body found:
And then on February 22, 1975 the dream came crashing down. A family out for a walk in a rural area of Langley, BC found Debbie’s body just off a road. She had been beaten, strangled, and left to drown in six inches of water. Coroner Doug Jack described the killing as “an enraged frustrated attack.”
Debbie lived in Langley and worked as a cocktail waitress at the OK Corral in New Westminster, a bar that featured live country music. On the night that she died, Debbie left to drive home around 2:00 a.m. The next day her blue Chevrolet Nova was found parked and locked on a desolate section of the Fraser Highway called Fry’s Corner. Her body was found seven kilometres away.
Several Suspects:
The family won’t get closure until Debbie’s murder is solved. The worst part, they say, is always wondering who did it. They’ve wondered about an older family friend who was infatuated with Debbie. They wondered if it was a current or an old boyfriend. They wondered if it was a stranger who followed Debbie from the bar. They even wondered if it was one of the two police officers that had sometimes stopped Debbie on her way home to ask her out.
“If they ever had any suspects, they never told us,” Marianne Roe, Debbie’s mother told me.
SHOW NOTES
If you have any information about Debbie’s murder, please call Langley RCMP at (604) 532-3200, or if you wish to remain anonymous, call crime stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or visit solvecrime.ca
Intro: Mark Dunn
Theme music: Andreas Schuld Waiting for You & Growl of Some Young Pups
Interviews: Aaron Chapman, historian and author, Kym Neumann and Tony Medway
Buy me a coffee promo: McBride Communications and Media
Sources:
Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders, Eve Lazarus, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015
Vancouver After Dark: The Wild History of a City’s Nightlife, Aaron Chapman, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019
Promo: Blood, Sweat and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance
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13 comments on “Debbie Roe: From Langley to Nashville”
A claw hammer! A bit of an overkill. Women no matter how insignificant should tell someone if they were hit on. Men do not take rejection well.
James, re: “no matter how insignificant”…. I suggest you consider how you would feel if you were described as, “James, no matter how insignificant he was…” Your comment belittles the loss of an innocent life because she was female.
Maybe James meant to address the attack itself, and not the woman. I.E.: “no matter how insignificant the sexual interference may seem …. ” Right? Maybe James will agree or disagree with me.
You’re right, they don’t. It just seems as if certain men believe that when they invite a woman on a date, or to have sex, or to dance, that alone makes her HIS and she ought to be delighted and charmed by his attention. And if they have dated, and his desire for sex is rejected, he’s so offended that he may be apt to actually KILL. What IS it about that male brain? The testosterone-infused ego is dangerously toxic and really primitive.
A number of points to be made. At that time, that generation associated a cocktail waitress, Go Go Dancers, and ‘Penthouse’ workers as being loose and part time hookers. Gay people were disturbed, you didnt want color moving into your community, and women had six kids. The generation before me and I am making a generalization. It also appeared to take longer to associate one murder with the next murder, like twenty years before DNA etc. Eve, my last comment is time passes on quickly, people move, people die, people lose their memory, communities are built where there used to be farms only. I would like to think that sick disturbed people also dont treat themselves well, live isolated, and die alone at a relatively young age.
Those are very broad, sweeping generalizations, even you admit it. But I’m a born-and-bred white Canadian woman and we never looked at go-go dancers in the way you describe. They were actually looked at as kind of silly, preppy, trendy high schoolers who found a dancing gig! Sorta like cheerleaders, not whores or strippers! Gheeshe! And we/they didn’t refer to Blacks as “color in the neighborhood”, either! No one I know ever said such things. They might say, “We have a Black family that just moved in down the street”, since it was a little unusual back in the day, but they didn’t talk about “colored” like the Americans always have. Truth be told we are more civil in Canada. Gays were being bashed and disgraced and they still are, and added to that now is the Muslim faith, violence toward the Feminine half of humanity still rages on with men being the culprits in nearly 90% of all cases, and on it goes. And NO, women and their male partners had already begun to have smaller families rather than 6 or 7 kids, they whittled it down to 2, 3, and 4 by my generation. In fact, big families were rather frowned on because we do NOT need population expansion any more on this planet, and we’ve thought that way ever since the early 1960s. Hello? And when you speak of connecting one homicide to another, think again. The term “serial killer” was first coined in the 1970s, but the actual serial killer has existed since time immemorial. They caught serial killers in ancient times and beyond but don’t forget the evil Jack the Ripper, and all the royals who killed countless hundreds of people. Serial killers have long been connected to and tried for their crimes. It’s nothing new. But, in some cases DNA and other technologies help speed things up, that’s all. And one lst point to dispute with you. The “sick, disturbed people” you mention, exist in all levels of society, in every country in the world, have throughout history, and some treat themselves very well indeed! Some are extremely wealthy. What do you think Queen Elizabeth I did? Her pirates (murderers, rapists, property thieves, thugs) were to her what the Hell’s Angels are today, or any organized crime connected with politics is. Read your history books, kiddo. So MANY serial killers have turned out to be “family guys”, “loving dads”, “ordinary women”, good employees, church-goers, scout leaders (ugh), priests, nuns, kings, queens, the kid you went to school with from that rich family. And they don’t die alone, and young. What you wrote was nearly all opinion and no reliable fact that could withstand a good, challenging, intellectual argument. Sorry but it’s such bias, and I wish you’d refrain from passing it on to unsuspecting readers. Thanks.
Very well said, Neilly. I agree with everything you have described. Maybe you are a Psychologist or you read documentaries like I do. Thank you for explaining the mainly female victims’ side. I am sure James meant no abuse but he just is not well read about this very complicated mental condition some men have, or women also, as I noted in some of England’s mass murders.
I still believe Clifford Olson,is responsible for Debbie’s death,and a few more in the area.
Olson was in jail for the majority of the 70’s. Also, he targeted children and teens, not grown women.
How do you lose DNA?
Apparently there were a variety of ways back in the day. Most likely misfiled, thrown out or contaminated
It’s called incompetence. There’s a lot of it around.
The murder of Debbie Roe has haunted me for decades, because her death was personal. She and her sister lived on 21B Avenue in Aldergrove, a part of Langley Municipality. We lived on 248th. Street, a block from their house and I visited them regularly. Debbie’s dad Emil was a backhoe operator and he worked on the acreage I had just bought a few miles away. I remember how terribly difficult it was for him to operate his backhoe following Debbie’s murder, and the well he dug for us, tilted much like the Leaning Tower of Piza forever stands as a reminder of those terribly dark days. I was a teacher at North Otter Elementary School on 248th. Street in the early 1970’s and I invited Debbie and Vicky to the school to do a presentation in the gym, following their successful return from Nashville recording session. Emil was intensely proud of his daughter’s success in Nashville and Debbie’s murder smashed the chances of an upcoming new musical duo. I’ll never forget walking over to the Roe’s place on 21B a couple of days after Debbie’s murder. They lived in a trailer on a 5 acre section of land on 21B. It was a very somber visit. Terry Jacks was there in the kitchen, seated quietly as Emil … Sad! Terry Jacks was the driving force behind two well known 1970’s music groups – The Poppy Family, and The Chessmen. In fact, Youtube has one of Terry Jack’s outstanding guitar tunes. Meadowlands. The link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unJwMMos8DI It is a guitar version of an old Russian folk song and well worth a listen. Here is a link to Terry Jack’s Youtube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wKn3bP9Uvo My North Otter students were extremely upset by Debbie’s murder and having interacted with Debbie and her sister when I brought them to the school made if very challenging because for these Grade 7 students it was the first time they’d encountered the evil of murder. For some inexplicable reason the North Otter principal had decided that only my class should attend the Roe girls’ performance, so the rest of the students in the school were not emotionally involved in Debbie’s loss. Now, personally, I simply cannot fathom why any person would want to behave in the way he did toward Debbie Roe, eventually killing her. If it were up to me, if that person were found, they should be executed, but first subjected to the same torment to which they subjected Debbie. What that person did – and we do have our suspicions as to who it was – inflicted on society a massive, incalculable loss. That person killed not just the chance for the creation of an outstanding Canadian musical duo, but he also killed all of the children that Debbie might righfully have born, and in turn, the children that they too might have born. An entire lineage was cut short by the despicable, selfish, miserable act of one depraved madman. As far as I’m concerned, such madmen should be subjected to a local version of the Nuremberg gallows. Any readers looking in from a distance, removed from the Roe murder, might wonder how anyone could think this way. To that I can say – until you are there, personally, having known a beautiful girl like Debbie Roe and then see her life viciously snatched away, you simply lack the ability to render a rational judgement. And finally, I have to say that writing this has brought back such a flood of memories of Debbie and her sister, and of dad Emil, and the girls North Otter Elementary visit, that I’m in tears. Something I rarely admit to anyone. How I wish I could turn back time!